UIC ARPA-H
I’ve been fortunate since starting Story as a Service and focusing on higher education as our niche that I haven’t really had to do any “cold” outreach for business development. All our partners thus far have come to us through some “warm” lead – a relationship at most or just a connection at the least. In a business that relies, depends on trust and confidence, being able to build our business on who we know (and who knows us) has been essential.
Towards the end of 2024, I was feeling a bit listless. Work was good but business development was slow. I was talking about it with my friend, business partner, and SaaS co-founder James Altman about it and he said “then make some lists.” So, I did. Throughout my career – as an academic, an administrator, an edtech corporate shill – whenever I’ve felt that sense of “what do I do next” I make a list of interesting people that I want to talk to and then I set out to talk to them.
I’ve known Cathy Grimsted forever. She was my predecessor as associate dean at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and Northwestern and have remained good friends and confidantes since we’ve both left the staff fold at NU. When I made that list Cathy was working as the Chief of Staff at the Medical School at UIC. We had lunch and I told her what kind of work I was doing/pursuing and she said, “oh, you need to meet my colleague Rob Mitchum.”
Rob has since started working at Northwestern, a funny twist. But way back then a whole year or so ago Rob was doing communications at UIC, joint reporting to the VP for Research and for University Marketing and Communications. Cathy connected us and I vividly recall our first zoom conversation. I entered the invite and saw Rob’s office – he had stepped away for a moment. He had a Yo La Tengo poster on the wall behind his desk and, as a total indie rock music nerd, I knew this conversation was about to go spectacularly well.
I learned a bunch about Rob in that first conversation. About his career as a neuroscientist, his music journalism (he wrote the “dad rock” take down of Wilco for Pitchfork, which makes him a legend in my indie rock music nerd world), his family, his professional journey from scholar to communications expert. We shared a bunch of similar interests, experiences, goals – and he was generous from the jump to look for opportunities for us to work together, and for me to find a good partner at UIC. And not long after that first meeting, we found that opportunity.
Andy Boyd is a professor of Biomedical and Health Information Sciences at UIC. He is the lead PI on an ARPA-H project called CAIDF – Creating AI-Enabled All-Health Team Data Fabric. There’s a lot of acronyms and words in that previous sentence that need unpacking and explaining and that’s why Rob introduced me to Andy. Andy and his co-PIs, Nancy Lopez (Iowa) and Catherine Craven (then Missouri now Texas), had secured this three-year grant from the NIH and needed to translate their scientific vernacular into nouns and verbs anybody could understand. ARPA-H stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency-Health, government agencies (they do Defense and Environment, too) that fund cutting-edge, high-risk research.
The project was super cool. Using large language modeling, they were looking to integrate the largely quantitative electronic health systems data of doctors and hospitals with the largely qualitative diagnostic and treatment data of speech, occupational, and physical therapists. Why? “To unlock hidden data to develop actionable, automated, multidisciplinary care team patient health summaries and insights to improve patient care and enable scientific discoveries.” We came up with that sentence together.
We worked quickly and with alacrity with Andy, Karen, and Catherine. We conducted our Origin Engagement in just over a month. Four sessions – Listen, Clarify, Map, and Make. We clarified the core story of CAIDF and identified the three things that this power trio understood to be the optimal representation of their work. You see these three things in the above sentence, which formed a mission statement for the project. We then quickly mapped their stakeholders and moved to develop a quite nice but rough and ready website that could showcase their work and allow them to promote their events and activity. That was launched less than three months after our first meeting at the start of 2025.
The look and feel of the website was taken from the ARPA-H site since we didn’t want to prioritize one university’s brand over another in this multi-institutional project. The site is still up and I am happy to say it looks pretty great as they enter the second year of the grant and project. They’ve been fortunate to not have their funding compromised in the current environment – a testament to the core stated value of what they are researching and striving to achieve.
I’m proud of this work with CAIDF for a bunch of reasons: what we were able to do with them in a short amount of time, how we translated a highly complex scientific/computational project into quite human, resonant language, and, how much of a pleasure it was working with Andy, Nancy, and Catherine. Great people. Great academics. Generous. Accessible. Unpretentious. Fun and Funny. We didn’t know each other before the engagement, but the introduction to them was warm because of Rob, because of Cathy Grimstead. And now those three co-PIs will be on my outreach list the next time I feel a little listless.